Masked
by Illyria Lives
Summary: You're a Providence soldier; you've been trained for everything. So why do you feel so lost? Why do you feel like you're only a hidden face, powerless? You are a masked man, and this is your story.


You're standing in line, and the pride of the moment is tarnished by the mask you wear over your face.

Your uniform is new and stiff, and it's rubbing your elbow raw as you lift your right hand to salute your corporal, and you can be sure that most of your friends beside you in line are making faces at him, but you would never do that. You're the calm one, the in control one among them. You're happy to serve something like Providence, and God as your witness you'll help people the way you never could as a citizen.

You're all released back into the barracks after the short ceremony, and everyone is joking and packing up their belongings, thinking forward to when they would be sent off to the various Providence outposts and centers. Your mask comes off, and Jake, your best friend comes up and attempts to ruffle your hair, which still feels strange in its new, short, buzz cut. Jake still looks amazing with his hair gone, and doesn't he know it. He's a head taller than you to boot, and he makes a show of it by finagling your hood out of your belt and holding it over your head. You jump a few times for show before elbowing his ribs, making his arms lower. Your mask is back and you make sure that he doesn't attempt to get it again.

"So, where are you hoping to get stationed?" you ask, as if you hadn't been asking everyone that same question for the past two weeks up to graduation. Jake takes a moment to think it over as he follows you down the row of bunks to yours.

"Somewhere sunny," he says, and you're kind of surprised by the sincerity of his voice. He's never been straight with you for the twelve years that you've known him, and you double-check his expression over your shoulder to see a cold, graveness in his eyes that you're not sure that you like.

"Come on, what's the matter?" you ask, and he shrugs. Even though his hood, like the hoods of everyone else in the room is tucked away, you can't help but feel that it's back over his face, blocking something from view.

But he's Jake the joker, so you leave his feelings unrifled and his mask on. You're at your bunk by then, and you begin to pull your street clothes out and away, into a large duffel. They're soon followed by a journal and a picture of your little sister. She looks a lot like you, people say, but you know that that's not true. Your little sister is adorable and sweet and smiles too much. You have a gruffness to your honesty that puts you at odds with most people, and you're not sure when you saw yourself smile last.

Jake is leaning against your bunk, and he has his smile back on. "What about you?" he asks, and you raise a yellow eyebrow. "You know," he elaborates, "Your stationing. Where do you want to go?"

You could answer a dozen different ways, and, like Jake, you mull your answer over carefully for a few moments. You're just ground infantry, so most odds point to you ending up in a big city, like New York or L.A., where there's plenty of people turning every day. You think in numbers and odds, so you know not to hope for anything fancy or anything easy. Generals don't send troops into areas where there's no one to fight.

"Well…" you let it roll out, before you could bite it back, "maybe somewhere easy, you know. Nothing big, just animals, maybe. No humans."

Jake's laughing at you and you really, _really _want him to stop.

"What?" you bark, and glare at him. He puts his hands up to calm you down, but it only makes you angrier.

"Dude, we're _Providence _now. We're gonna be fighting EVOs, not people. You need to get that in your head." with another chuckle at your idiocy, he pushes himself upright and leaves you alone, and you're thinking of your sister again, your sweet, adorable, smiley little sister. You hope that you're not stationed at your hometown of Louisiana.

You're not. Jake, in a strange twist of fate, is sent there.

You go to Boston.

As you go off to your carrier, you pass along your picture of your sister to Jake, along with your address, and tell him to give her your best. He agrees, and you know he will forget.

You're counting on it.

* * *

><p>You've been in Boston for two months, and you hate it. The people are different, you have no friends, and you've spent all two months cleaning your tranquilizer gun.<p>

And then.

And then you're fighting in a line with other soldiers, mask on, and the lumbering blob of muscle that was trundling down the street was heading right towards you, ignoring your shots like an irritating fly. You've been trained for this, for two years you've studied and practiced. You could bring down an EVO in your sleep.

But not this. You haven't been trained for this.

There's a woman, a fleeing woman in one of those foreign headscarf things. It's white, edged in blue, and you think for the briefest moment that it frames her face quite nicely. But then the EVO roars and you would have fired again if the headscarf lady hadn't ran right at you, pounding her tiny little fists into your chest with a scream that you don't care to decipher. You stumble back, more out of surprise than anything else, and she follows you, still pounding, still screaming; only now you can almost pick out individual words.

"I hate you," she says, and God, she starts to _cry_. Tears form and fall from her eyes, which show something shattered, broken, deep inside of her. She had wounded eyes, eyes that had seen too much for her. You've never been good with crying, and you feel lost for a few brief seconds looking into those hopeless, begging eyes, which lands you a few feet in front of the line of soldiers, who are still firing as they walk backwards, like you should be. But you can't, because that little woman in the headscarf is changing her yell; it's become "Stop it! You're hurting him! Stop shooting, you monster!"

You can hear your own voice, and see your little sister.

You grab the sides of her arms, and her expression becomes terrified. Terrified of you, terrified of how she couldn't see your face, and before she can wriggle free, you're breaking every rule in the Providence handbook by taking her away from the tranquilizer bullets that are whizzing past you, rather than just shrugging her off.

But God _damn, _she's crying, and you hate that.

Your superior is yelling at you through your comm. to get back to shooting, but you have to make sure that the headscarf lady gets out of the way. She's a little less scared of you when you release one of her arms in favor of dragging her behind you, and returns to her screaming and her pounding at you, and you are almost deaf with her cries of "That's my father! Get away from my father!"

You lose it a bit then, as she makes you stumble over a curb, and you return to holding her upper arms. "Shut up!" you say, not harsh like you intended, but rather soft and gentle, a plead, and she stops, surprised. She's looking at you again, with those terrible crying eyes, in a strange, gauging way, almost like she's trying to peer past your mask. You want to look away, but can't.

She finishes her search; she doesn't find anything. This doesn't surprise you.

And then you're finally shoving her down as a ricocheting tranquilizer bullet hits the wall near her and enters your shoulder. Rather than pain, you feel a spreading numbness that adds pounds to your shoulders, and you fall down. The headscarf lady looks down at you in fear before taking off without a thank you.

You shouldn't have gotten involved with her. You should have been fighting the EVO, not the human.

Or were you?

According to your commanding officer, you weren't. You are reassigned once you regain consciousness.

Before you travel, they give you two days of leave in Boston. You spend it looking for the headscarf lady, but you never find her. And you can't help but think about how nice she looked with her white scarf. Even if you had found her, what would you have said? She wouldn't recognize you without your mask. Or would she tilt her head and give you that same, gauging look, and hit you like she did before and somehow know that you were the faceless man who pulled her away from her EVO father?

You can't decide which way you'd like it. You don't press the issue.

They send you home.

* * *

><p>You reunite with Jake, who's still taller than you and still smug about it. You laugh a little, swap some stories that may or may not have happened and you deduce that he hasn't seen your sister. He mentions her once or twice, and you file away his offerings of a meeting to do later.<p>

One month passes before he finally gets it.

You're sitting there, not really doing anything in particular, and he stalks up, anger in his eyes, and grabs you by the front of your fatigues. You're about to snap something, and he cuts you off with a hissed, "You jackass." He looks at you like you're garbage, and you see that he has the paper with your mother's address in one hand.

You immediately know where he's been.

You try to explain, but he won't have it. He drags you off your chair and manhandles you outside, down the block, and the entire way you're choking on your words, trying to explain a concept that you don't want to understand.

He pushes you ahead of him inside the hospital, not caring how much you swear, or how much you struggle; it's not his problem that you ran into every fucking door jamb in the place. You even think that your right arm is dislocated, but then it becomes the least of your worries as Jake unceremoniously throws you into the open doorway of a small little life support room.

The first thing you see is the woman, shorter than most, with pale hair and eyes in a worried, creased face that looked about as surprised as you felt.

You hear yourself say "Hi, mom."

You turn to the figure in the hospital bed, hooked up through wires and tubes to various machines like spider webbing, holding her down and in place. That pain in your chest that you haven't felt for years is starting back up, stopping you from breathing for the few brief moments that it takes for you to summon up a very shaky, "Hi, sis."

She's smiling her wonderful smile at you, but it only makes the pain worse as she tries to say your name past her fangs, which are crowding her mouth and making it hard to move her jaw. Her arms are thin and her fingers are too long to be natural, and worse of all is the pulsing, twitching part of her that looks as if she's being turned inside out, spilling rubbery tentacles over the side of the bed.

Tears are in your eyes and hell, you could care less. You push past Jake, who's still frozen in the doorway, frozen and frightened of your sweet, smiley little sister.

You hate him.

You can barely make it outside of the hospital before you lose it, and you're wailing like you're ten years old again and your adorable little sister is dying of a lump in her brain, only now you're a twenty something in a black and white Providence uniform and you shouldn't be crying over a girl who's not technically a girl anymore, she's an EVO and you should be somewhere else, anywhere else, shooting at something like her.

At any time, you could be shooting at her.

You sense Jake sit beside you on the curb.

"I'm sorry."

"I hate you."

"I know."

You haven't felt like this since the Event, when she started to change, but the lump wouldn't let her change immediately. It made her change slowly, painfully, until the day came that it would fully take over and she'd be rampaging through the streets.

You feel so trapped by that damn stitch in your chest, and you want to go away, anywhere that didn't have a dying little sister in a hospital bed. Maybe if you just fought a little harder, and trapped more EVOs to be cured, then they could find some way to help her, to save her, and maybe if you were lucky, you could be the one to be there and take her in safely.

But you didn't want that, did you?

You didn't want to have to face the fact that you no longer had a sister, because EVOs weren't human, they were faceless monsters that needed to be put down or trapped.

But still; that old, pre-Event smile is a ghost standing beside you. You try, but you cannot shake it.

Why did Jake have to bring it up? He didn't understand; he couldn't understand. It was none of his fucking business, frankly, and in your eyes it's the same, if not worse, as if he had turned a gun on you. A gun that you couldn't dodge, that made a wound that would never really heal.

You clumsily wipe your tears away and stand, Jake echoing your motions. You find that you still hate him, even more than before, when it was just some words in your mouth. So you send one wild punch his way, knocking him flat and possibly breaking his nose. His blood adds a bright scarlet flower to the front of his shirt, but you don't get as much satisfaction from it as you hoped. Just an empty, echoing hollowness to that spot in your chest where your heart is supposed to be.

You leave him there, on the ground, calling after you, and put it all, mother, sister, friend, behind you.

You request to be moved. They ship you to Orlando, Florida. Nice and sunny.

You never look back.

* * *

><p>There's a girl there, with big green eyes, who works in a coffee shop down the street from your barracks. You've never liked coffee before, but you think that you can learn to. She's not like the headscarf girl, not at all, but when you meet her you can't help but remember her. You think back and hope that she's alright, wherever she is.<p>

The problem is that the coffee shop girl won't have a thing to do with you, not when she first meets you in your uniform, your mask on over your head. You had been walking past the shop to the convoy that had deposited you onto the street for the fight, and you saw her in the window, bent over to talk to a seated customer. She laughs, her hair moving like water, and you can barely imagine how soft it must be. It reaches her tiny little waist in waves of bright red.

She looks up and catches you, turned her way. You are trying to decide what to do, what to say, when she salutes you with her middle finger.

You decide that you like her. She isn't a person who takes other people's shit. And you need someone like that right now.

So, the next time you're out on a day-leave, you don some civvies and walk over to the coffee shop. She's there, serving people, so you order something with a really long and complicated name that tastes like coffee and take a seat. When she gives you your mug, she looks you over once and asks if she's seen you anywhere.

You don't answer. She leaves. The next time you show up you order the same overly complicated brew and she smirks as she's delivering it, saying "Now, I can say for sure that I've seen you before."

You stumble through some flirting before exchanging names and numbers. You text. You talk.

And for some reason, you can't tell her about the mask you wear.

Finally, it escalates into some dates, nothing major. You have to leave one date early because you've been called into a battle across town with a particularly large EVO. It was misleading with the size, and you bag it without firing a shot. As its being taken away in an open-air cage, a splattering of red paint is thrown across you and your team, soaking into your skin. You turn with some angry, defensive words on your lips and you see your girl, her pretty face contorted into a mask of anger as she yells and screams at you, calling you, among other things, a slaver, a killer, a heartless automaton. You stand there in this torrent of insults and watch as the police restrain her and others behind her, laden with painted anti-Providence signs.

You think, again, of the headscarf girl. Of how she screamed at you. She was different, although her words were sung to the same tune. She was lost, broken, pleading. Your girl was something else completely. There was nothing in her eyes, no hope, and no despair. She screamed and she raged from somewhere different, somewhere hidden. She was hiding behind the hatred of Providence to protect herself from something else, something that scared you in a way you had never been scared before.

You return to base, put on your civvies, and go back to the store to meet her for a date. You think to see her sorry, broken, regretting, anything. But you meet her as you always have, with her closing the few feet between you with a hug and a long, deep kiss that reminds you that you could get something extra if you played your cards right. But today, the closer she tried to get to you, through hands and lips, the farther she seemed. As her lips passed over the skin on the side of you neck, you feel her breath as hate and rage.

You leave after the date; no talking, no kissing.

You don't call her again.

* * *

><p>You were drunk; you were foolish.<p>

You called your mother.

She answered, with that voice that made you feel both safe and guilty, with a typical, "Hello?"

You hung up and felt like shit.

* * *

><p>You weren't supposed to feel like this.<p>

You are supposed to be happy, proud, safe and in control while you were in Providence. You could maybe be the one man that stopped a kill and made it a contain.

But.

But you went to bed each night more tired than the day before. You saw the same thing each day; someone losing the fight with the nanites, and someone crying over them. Why did they have to cry so much? It wasn't like they had died, was it? Were they still there, inside those twisted and morphed bodies? Should you have been with your sister, waiting for her to turn, or was it a hopeless cause? What could you, little you, do for her other than help others like her? Maybe one contain that you helped could break the code, help heal her. But why didn't it?

You ask yourself these questions and wonder if anyone else is, too.

But those masks, those damn masks, stop you from seeing the answer in the eyes of your friends. If they are your friends.

No word from Jake.

You kind of miss him.

* * *

><p>You consider quitting.<p>

Why not? There's nothing for you anymore. Only a paycheck, and it's not even that good.

* * *

><p>You get a phone call from your mother. You missed it, you were out on patrol, but when you listen to the message, all you can hear is crying.<p>

You call her back. No answer.

The news is on. You watch it like you do most nights in the mess hall, but suddenly you're not anywhere when you see a fanged, tentacle covered EVO thrashing down a public city street.

You know that street.

Louisiana.

The EVO turns to the camera. You stop breathing and somehow your face gets wet.

You know that smile.

A tall man runs forward, shooting. You try and tell yourself that it could be any tall Providence soldier, anyone, but you can't convince yourself. A tentacle shoots out and wraps around his neck. You can't hear the snap, but you can see him go limp, like a marionette with his strings cut. He falls to the sidewalk and is still.

The EVO gives a good fight, but after that one death, the soldiers can't be stopped. It crumples; it falls, and doesn't move.

What is that noise? What is that God damn racket that's splitting your ears? What in hell-

Oh. You close your mouth, your throat stinging. Everyone stares after you as you run away, outside, dialing number after number on your phone. You finally get your mother on, and she's crying and crying and you are too, and everything is wrong, the whole world is wrong, and you need to change it, need to fix it, and you're by the coffee shop again, and you could care fucking less about her seeing you, which she does, and she's open mouthed but then you're past her and you're not looking back.

The headscarf girl. She's running through your head again and you can't get her out.

You finally lose the connection to your mother. And you're left, in the middle of somewhere you don't want to be, and you can't think of what to do next.

So you do the one logical thing.

You put on your mask and go back to work, hiding everything else away.

Everyone is staring at you, wanting to see what had made you lose it earlier, but you do nothing, say nothing. They never mention it again.

* * *

><p>The next day, you're introduced to a boy, a young boy, who can cure EVOs. His name is Rex.<p>

His smile breaks your heart.

* * *

><p>Its years, years later, and you're on leave, back in Boston, waiting for a bus on a hard stone bench. You've changed, so much, since the beginning. You don't want to face it, but you have. The wounds you've suffered, mental and physical, have knit themselves back together into silent scars which leave a simple ache that is easy enough to hide beneath an empty smile.<p>

You're still in Providence, despite a time when you entertained the idea of quitting. Instead, you've been promoted, and you follow orders now, no questions. You're on good terms with Rex and Agent Six, and you've even had a few good chats with Dr. Holiday.

You're not paying much attention to your surroundings, but when a woman sits next to you, you can't help but glance up.

She's a pretty little thing in a white headscarf and blue edging, tiny hands clasped in her lap. Her doe-brown eyes are no longer shattered, but calm and composed.

She notices you looking at her and smiles gently. When you don't look away in embarrassment, it widens, showing pearly teeth. One hand reaches over for yours. You push past the way your fingers are trembling and take her hand gently.

"Basma*," she introduces herself. An accent. You usually forget about that when you're hearing her scream at you back in the beginning, when you were faceless and powerless.

"Callan." You find yourself saying. "My name is Callan."

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Basma, Arabic= Smile**


End file.
